In maintaining this doctrine of the necessary
limitation of knowledge to appearances or rather in degrading the known world
to a mere outward show, positivism makes peace, in principle, with every kind
of superstition. It takes the seriousness out of theory since the latter must
prove itself in practice. If non-positivist metaphysics must exaggerate its own
knowledge (since by its nature it must claim autonomy for itself), positivism,
on the contrary, reduces all possible knowledge to a collection of external data.
In addition, it usually overlooks the contradiction between its own metaphysical
description of known reality as appearance and externality, on the one hand, and
its ostensible power of prevision, on the other (the latter already containing
the undialectical separation of subject and object). "Not to know the true
but only the appearance of the temporal and accidental, only what is emptythis
emptiness has become widespread in philosophy and is still being broadcast in
our time, and even boasts of itself." [48]

This objection of Hegel
to the Enlightenment can today be directed primarily against positivism, which
of course originated in the Enlightenment. Hegel himself, despite the sound of
his words here, did not separate truth and knowledge from the temporal; on the
contraryand this is the secret of his depth of thoughthe made knowledge
of the temporal as temporal the content of philosophy. His idealism consists in
the belief "that to call a thing finite or limited proves by implication
the very presence of the infinite and unlimited, and that our knowledge of a limit
can only be when the unlimited is on this side in consciousness.'"
[49]

Yet, despite his hostility to it, Hegel is closer to the genuine Enlightenment
than positivism is, because he admits nothing to be in principle inaccessible
to human knowledge and subject to surmise alone. Positivism, on the other hand,
is very conscious of its tolerance in this respect; it even wanted its very name
to be interpreted expressly as opposition to the "negative," that is
to any denial of such surmise. Sound philosophy, says Comte, leaves aside necessarily
insoluble problems but in so doing it remains more impartial and more tolerant
than its opponents. It investigates the factors that conditioned the duration
and decline of former systems of belief

without ever engaging
in any absolute rejection.... In this way it renders scrupulous justice not only
to various monotheistic systems besides the one which is dying among us today,
but also to polytheistic or even fetishistic beliefs, while always relating them
to the corresponding phase of the basic evolutionary process.[50]

An
historical understanding of these beliefs signifies here simultaneously the recognition
of a correlative area of reality which is in principle inaccessible to knowledge
and not assumed into the historical dialectic.

Materialism, too, seeks an
historical comprehension of all spiritual phenomena. But its insight that there
can be no infinite knowledge does not lead to impartiality in the face of a claim
by any finite knowledge to be infinite. Thought is recognized to be limited, but
no areas are set aside to which thought is not to be applied. This opinion of
the positivists is itself in fact a contradiction. That we do not know everything
does not mean at all that what we do know is the nonessential and what we do not
know, the essential. These faulty judgments, by which positivism has knowingly
made its peace with superstition and declared war on materialism, allow us to
see that Bergson's depreciation of theoretical thinking and the rise of modem
intuitionist metaphysics are a result of positivist philosophy.

Positivism
is really much closer to a metaphysics of intuition than to materialism, although
it wrongly tries to couple the two. Since the turn of the century positivism has
seemed, in comparison with the reigning metaphysics, not to be "concrete"
enough, that is, really, not spiritualist enough. But in fact positivism and metaphysics
are simply two different phases of one philosophy which downgrades natural knowledge
and hypostatizes abstract conceptual structures. Bergson, like vitalism generally,
bases his metaphysics of la durée on the doctrine of an immediate
datum which is verified by intuition; the only distinction from positivism is
that for Bergson this datum is not made up of discrete and detached elements but
consists of the intuitively known vital flow of life itself. The metaphysics of
the elements, the interpretation of reality as a sum-total of originally isolated
data, the dogma of the unchangeableness of the natural laws, the belief in the
possibility of a definitive system are an the special metaphysical theses of positivism.
It has in common with intuitionism the subjectivist claim that immediate primary
data, unaffected by any theory, are true reality, as well as the use of "only"
by which both philosophies try to limit any theory of rational prevision (a theory
which, we must admit, they wrongly interpret along mechanistic lines).

In
their opposition to materialism, therefore, positivism and intuitionism are at
one. In fact, if the defenselessness of these philosophies before any and all
supernaturalist tendencies may be said to find especially obvious expression in
their helplessness in the face of spiritism and occultism, then Bergson even takes
precedence over Comte. A philosophy with metaphysical content fills the transcendental
regions with its own speculations. Therefore, as Comte says reproachfully, it
"has never been able to be anything but critical" [51] towards prevailing
doctrines of the afterlife. Bergson must begin, consequently, by expressly assuring
us that the transcendence of consciousness is "so probable that the
burden of proof falls on him who denies it, not on him who affirms it" and
that philosophy leads us "little by little to a state of mind which is practically
equivalent to certitude." [52] Comte, on the other hand, having equated reality
with subjective data and mere appearances, is antecedently and in principle rendered
helpless before all claims to have experienced the suprasensible.

At the
present time it is hardly possible to distinguish between the more positivist
and the more intuitionist forms of a philosophy that is marked by such subjection
to the occult. According to Hans Driesch it is clear that his teaching "not
only is not opposed to the 'occult' but even paves the way for it." [53]
Bergson does not hesitate to assure us in his most recent book

that if, for example, the reality of "telepathic phenomena" is called
in doubt after the mutual corroboration of thousands of statements which have
been collected on the subject, it is human evidence in general that must, in the
eyes of science, be declared to be null and void: what, then, is to become of
history?

and he does not think it impossible "that a gleam
from this unknown world reaches us, visible to our bodily eyes." [54] In
fact, Bergson seriously conjectures that such messages from the other world could
bring about a total transformation of mankind. The neglect of the theoretical
in favor of the bare immediate datum thus wholly robs philosophy of its illuminative
effect. "Whenever sensation with its alleged independence is taken as the
criterion of reality, the distinction between nature and ghosts can become blurred."
[55]

The disciples of Comte, especially the empirico-criticists and the
logical positivists, have so refined their terminology that the distinction between
simple appearances, with which science deals, and the essential is no longer to
be found. But the depreciation of theory makes itself felt nonetheless in very
varying ways, as when Wittgenstein declares, in his otherwise first-rate Tractatus
logico-philosophicus:

We feel that even when all possible
scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely
untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this is itself the
answer . . . There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make
themselves manifest. They are what is mystical." [56]

Neither
does materialism, as we explained above, believe that the problems of life are
solvable in a purely theoretical way, but it also regards it as unthinkable that
"after a long period of doubt ... the sense of life" [57] could become
clear in any other way. If hypostatized in such a way, there is no "mystical"
and no "sense of life."

Materialism has in common with positivism
that it acknowledges as real only what is given in sense experience, and it has
done so since its beginnings. "What we contemplate in mind has its whole
origin in sense perception," says Epicurus. [58] "If you fight against
all sensations, you will have no standard by which to judge even those of them
which you say are false." [59] Throughout its history materialism has held
to this theory of knowledge, which serves it as a critical weapon against dogmatic
concepts. On the other hand, materialism does not absolutize sensation.

The
requirement that every existent manifest itself through the senses does not mean
that the senses do not change in the historical process or that they are to be
regarded as fixed cornerstones of the world. If the evidence of sense experience
is part of the grounds for existential judgments, such experiences are far from
identical with the constant elements of the world. Theory is always more than
sensibility alone and cannot be totally reduced to sensations. In fact, according
to the most recent developments in psychology, far from being the elementary building
blocks of the world or even of psychic life, sensations are derivatives arising
only through a complicated process of abstraction involving the destruction of
formations which the psyche had shaped. [60] Even apart from these two considerations,
we must say that eternity cannot be predicated of our sensibility. Like the relation
of "subject" to "data," it is conditioned and changeable.
Even in the same period of time individual subjects have contradictory perceptions,
and the differences are not to be resolved simply by appeal to a majority but
only with the help of theory. Sense experiences are indeed the basis of knowledge,
and we are at every point referred back to them, but the origin and conditions
of knowledge are not identically the origin and conditions of the world.